All Publications
Movies are often sequentially offered through different distribution channels such as theaters, video sales and rentals, and online streaming. This research answers the question of how the advertising budget should be allocated across the various distribution channels to maximize overall profit. An extant allocation model is limited because of maximizing the logarithms of sales minus costs rather than true untransformed profit. Overcoming this limitation, my research offers a simple, near-optimal rule which takes into account not only the various effectiveness measures of advertising in terms of elasticities and, both, carryover and spillover effects, but also the size of the channels (expected profit) and truly maximizes profit. Due to its cascading property, the rule can be extended to any number of sequential distribution channels. This article also explains how the parameter values for the rule can be obtained and what profit improvement can be gained depending on the data structure.
Restrictions imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed life. This affected the entertainment industry with consequences on the demand (consumer behavior in terms of quantity and preferences) and supply side (quantity of published products). Suffering from revenue losses because of canceled live events due to Covid-19, the music industry heavily relied on streaming revenues so we investigate how the lockdowns and other restrictions affected demand and supply within the music streaming industry. Using daily Spotify streaming data, as well as the MusicBrainz encyclopedia, we empirically investigate changes in the number of streams per day, listening preferences (demand side), and the number of releases (supply side) for the United States, Germany, Brazil, and Indonesia. For the demand side, the results imply that lockdown measures led to a decrease in the total number of streams per day. This coincided with country-specific changes in music preferences such as a short-term increase in the consumption of happy music. On the supply side, a global increase in songs released with increasing lockdown measures was found. Although most effects mitigate over time, they lead to serious ongoing financial consequences for artists, record labels, and streaming services.
Nowadays, platforms in many industries offer content for a (monthly) flat rate (e.g., music streaming). While flat rates are efficient in reducing transaction costs for administering customers, platforms’ rules for remunerating content right holders are crucial for royalty allocation and, as a result, heavily discussed in several industries. The music industry’s business practices could be on the verge of their next disruption. There is an ongoing heated debate with respect to how the income of flat rates through streaming services should be allocated to right holders (labels and artists). This research investigates aspects of the supply and demand side effects as well as the resulting monetary consequences of changing the currently applied proportional-to-usage remuneration policy (pro rata) to a user-centric policy. Using individual-level data from 3,326 participants and data from Spotify’s API, we empirically quantify the monetary consequences of this change for the music industry. Depending on the remuneration system, we find a substantial reallocation of nearly 170 million € per year at Spotify. We discuss demand and supply-side consequences that may change the way music is currently produced and consumed. We conclude with a research agenda on the impact of business conventions for users, platforms, and artists in the music streaming industry.
Digital technologies allow versioning a product (e.g., a movie) for different physical and digital sequential distribution channels to target heterogeneous consumer segments, thereby creating exclusive offers. Extant literature on sequential distribution for movies largely concentrates on the theater-to-home-video window length (e.g., DVD), thus, neglecting digital distribution channels, particularly the potential of exclusive digital offers when multiple subsequent home video channels are available. We empirically examine the impact of exclusive digital movie offers on demand in digital and physical distribution channels. We fit a system of equations to a unique sample of 260 movies distributed in theaters, digital purchases, digital rentals, and physical purchases channels. Overall, the results indicate substantial profits from exclusive offers. Rather than sales cannibalizations, we find positive cross-channel demand spillovers from exclusive digital offers to delayed physical purchases. Exclusive home video offers outperform mere reductions in the theatrical exclusivity period; thus, implementing exclusive digital home video releases is a promising alternative to avoid conflict-prone reductions of the overall theater-to-home-video release window. Our findings are also relevant to industries that use different online and offline release windows (book publishers) or give exclusive access across different platforms (game publishers).
Previous research on the impact of corporate crises on customers’ elasticity has largely focused on performance-related crises (e.g., product recalls) and found an increasing price elasticity under these conditions. We investigate whether this result differs for value-related crises that are due to ethical violations, such as the use of child labor or environmental pollution. In line with moral foundation theory (MFT), we propose that value-related crises lead to stronger moral outrage and increased boycott intentions, thereby decreasing price and product-performance elasticities. We first analyze more than 360,000 Facebook user comments in relation to four value-related and four performance-related crises and show that the different outcomes for value- and performance-related crises can be explained according to MFT. Then, through discrete choice experiments, we demonstrate that, in contrast to performance-related crises, price elasticity decreases substantially for a value-related crisis that affects both violating and nonviolating companies. We also show for the first time the impact on product-performance elasticities with similar negative effects as for price. The results are stable even for different product categories, causes of ethical violations, and measurement conditions. As a result, it is more difficult for companies to recover from value- than performance-related crises.
To optimally set marketing communication (“marcom”) budgets, reliable estimates of short-term elasticities and carryover effects are required. Empirical generalizations from meta-analyses of prior field studies can help guide these decisions. However, the last such meta-analysis of marcom carryover effects was performed on Koyck model–based estimates collected before 1984 and was confined to mass media advertising. The authors update and extend extant empirical generalizations via two meta-analyses of carryover estimates compiled from studies encompassing personal selling, targeted advertising, and mass media advertising, using diverse model forms, until 2015. The first is focused on and utilizes 918 estimates of the carryover proportion of the total effect, termed long-term share of the total effect, and the second focuses on 863 derivable estimates of 90% implied duration intervals. The authors find the mean long-term shares of the total effect for personal selling (.687) and targeted advertising (.650) are distinctly larger than that for mass media advertising (.523) and the corresponding median 90% implied duration intervals are 12.6, 2, and 3.4 months, respectively. The authors conclude by discussing differences by model type and the implications for marcom budget-setting and analyses.
In recent years, management and academics have increasingly focused on quality management in public transport. In particular, many public transport operators regularly monitor their service quality over time and use these data to assess quality performance (e.g., for performance-based quality contracts) and to determine managerial decisions (e.g., budget allocations for service improvements). However, despite the widespread applications of service quality data in practice, it is unclear whether cross-sectional analyses and cross-temporal comparisons of service quality data provide valid insights for quality management purposes. In this study, we investigate the usability of cross-sectional analyses and cross-temporal comparisons of service quality data by conducting an empirical study that tracked a panel’s perceptions of the service quality of public transport and its choice over the course of three consecutive years. The results demonstrate that cross-sectional analyses provide valid insights for quality management. However, cross-temporal comparisons should be interpreted carefully because the results of these comparisons are surprisingly unreliable. In fact, we find that service quality data do not provide reliable results over time and therefore conclude that cross-temporal comparisons of service quality data must be interpreted with caution for quality management in public transport.
In the last half-century, significant advances have been made in directing sales force behavior with the use of optimization and decision models. The present paper both presents the current state-of-the art in sales force decision modeling, and also discusses key issues and trends in contemporary modeling of relevance to sales force researchers. The paper begins by exploring critical concepts regarding the estimation of the sales response function, and then discusses critical problems of endogeneity, heterogeneity, and temporal variation that are faced by modelers in this task. Modern approaches to dealing with these issues are presented. We then discuss areas of importance concerning finding model solutions, including closed form versus simulation, and optimization versus heuristic solutions. The paper next moves to areas of practical importance where models can help, including call planning, sales force size, territory allocation, and compensation design. Finally, we discuss trends that will likely impact on sales force modeling in coming years, including the use of big data and data mining, the possible breakdown of rationality, the rise of the Internet and social media, and the potential of agent-based modeling.
How well universities prosper depends on their reputations, which in turn depend on high-level published research. I investigate German data from Handelsblatt and Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE ) for university business faculties and show that publication productivity is characterized by increasing returns to scale, which stem from the number of professors a university employs, and that a higher ratio of students per professor does not usually hurt productivity. Third-party funds show only a small and weakly significant impact. My analysis of the total costs of universities indicates that publications, student education, and contract research all exhibit significant economies of scale.
Recent cases of unethical publication behavior have raised the question of how to address it. Because scientific misconduct (conduct inconsistent with accepted scientific standards) can occur on a continuum ranging from honest errors to outright fraud, there is a need to change editorial policies to reduce the existence of any gray areas. In the case of quantitative empirical research, misconduct begins with honorary and ghost authors, plagiarism and self-plagiarism, and extends to manipulation or even fabrication of data and the reporting of biased or false results. It is suggested that journals should retract articles, inform retraction watch more frequently, use plagiarism software, ask for better and more detailed documentation of procedures so that research can be replicated and potentially analysed as manipulation, and reveal possible affiliations that might lead to biases. These policies will also facilitate faster learning, which will be beneficial to society.
„Vertriebsmanagement“ vermittelt anspruchsvoll und zugleich praxisnah, wie Außendienste professionell geführt und gesteuert werden können. Dabei greifen Sönke Albers und Manfred Krafft auf aktuellste Ergebnisse der internationalen Forschung zurück, verwenden Beispiele und Fallstudien aus dem europäischen bzw. deutschsprachigen Raum und belegen ihre Hinweise mit umfassenden eigenen Studien. Kurzum: ein Buch von Vertriebsexperten für Vertriebsexperten. Die Autoren schaffen ein deutschsprachiges Standardwerk, das sowohl als Grundlage der Ausbildung im BWL-Bachelor- und Masterstudium oder an Fortbildungsinstitutionen Verbreitung finden wird als auch akademisch interessierten Vertriebsmanagern kompetente Hinweise zum professionellen Management von Verkaufsaußendiensten bietet.
